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Acknowledgements
I cannot imagine a better time than the past 6 years I have spent at UC Berkeley as a
graduate student. I feel extremely fortunate to have received so much help and support
from so many individuals, without whom I can never reach this finish line of my Ph.D
journey. I would like to take this opportunity to express my most sincere gratitude to
every one of these companions.
I cannot feel luckier to have Prof. Elad Alon as my advisor. Elad’s knowledge,
patience as well as his inspiring lectures paved the path for me to become a good IC
designer. I can hardly think of a better advisor who is always willing to discuss with me
whenever I come up with new ideas and provides all sorts of support to implement them.
I still remember the hours of technical discussions we had over the phone, some of those
lasted deep into the night even when Elad needed to travel early in the next morning.
Without his insightful feedback, I could never conquer the obstacles I had faced during
my Ph.D studies. My gratitude to Elad is not limited to just research. He was always
happy to share with me his experiences working in both industry and academia, and
helped me resolve my concerns and difficult situations I encountered, all of which I
found very beneficial to shape a better view of my future career.
I would like to thank Prof. Jan Rabaey, Prof. Seth Sanders and Prof. Paul Wright
for being on my thesis and qualification exam committee. Their valuable feedback helped
me to reshape my ideas when conducting research. I want to thank Prof. Ali Niknejad for
his wonderful RF courses and the enjoyable soccer games he invited me to join. I also
want to thank Prof. Haideh Khorramabadi and Prof. Borivoje Nikolic for teaching my
ADC and digital IC design classes.
Throughout my Ph.D, I have got the opportunities to collaborate with many
talents from various research institutes. I would like to thank Ming-Shuan Chen, Amr
Hafez and Prof. Ken Yang of UCLA, Kangmin Hu, Rui Bai and Prof. Patrick Chang of
Oregon State University, Amr Suleiman of MIT, Prof. Vladimir Stojanovic of UC
Berkeley and Prof. Pavan Hanumolu of UIUC for the fruitful discussions and their
insightful comments/feedback on my research. I certainly cannot get my work done
without the gracious support from our industry partners and therefore I owe my thanks to
Bryan Casper, Tanay Karnik, Mondira Pant of Intel, Yasuo Hidaka and William Walker
of Fujitsu Laboratories of America as well as Ken Chang and Yohan Frans of Xilinx. I
have met many great people in industry who helped me improve my technical strength. In
particular, I would like to thank Jared Zerbe, Brian Leibowitz and Wenbo Liu of Apple,
Jihong Ren of Altera and Yueyong Wang of Broadcom.
Berkeley Wireless Research Center is a fabulous place with a group of amazing
people. I want to thank all the BWRC staff and especially Tom Boot, Brian Richards,